There are basically two types of bait an angler can use to catch fish: artificial lures and natural bait. Artificial lures have their fans and have certain advantages. For example, they can last indefinitely, be repeatedly used and even passed down to others, and can be painted bright, garish colors or have mirrored surfaces that stand out from their surroundings. Live bait, however, is still preferred by many anglers. Live bait will swim or struggle naturally when impaled on a hook, thereby attracting nearby fish. Live bait also has a certain smell that a plastic lure doesn't, which may be detected by the sought after fish. Live bait is also something a fish would ordinarily recognize as food, increasing the likelihood of a hit by a fish.
Live bait however, does have it's downsides. The number that a person can carry is finite, and although a minnow may live for a few casts, its attractiveness as a bait diminishes when it dies. If an angler runs out of live bait, or the bait dies before it can be used, the alternatives are to fall-back on an artificial lure or stop fishing; neither of which is a good option. As used herein, “minnow” should be understood to comprise all species of fish and other aquatic animals suitable as bait.
Most typically, anglers using live bait carry them in a minnow bucket, which, in its most basic form, is simply a pail. Often a sample of minnows are removed from the bucket to a smaller, more portable minnow jar. As used herein, “minnow container” or “container” is used to refer to either minnow buckets or pails. Over the last couple hundred years, other than changes in the materials used to construct them, little about minnow containers has changed. Although delving one's hand into water vessel to catch a minnow might sound like fun, it's not always easy to catch and pull one out without mangling it. At least, it's not easy until they die, which can easily happen if the level of dissolved oxygen in the water drops too low. Since minnow activity is related to the dissolved oxygen concentration, a careful angler will periodically assess minnow activity and attempt to change or aerate the water when activity slows. The oxygen level will more quickly drop with a high concentration of minnows, and a low concentration of minnows makes it more difficult to catch one in the bucket. Although perhaps not the biggest dilemma one might face, it remains a persistent one for anglers.
There have been patented minnow containers that have tried to mitigate this dilemma by either claiming to make the minnows easier to grab, such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 302,086 and 1,986,742; but most work in the minnow container art has been directed towards aerating the water such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 553,456, 2,706,870, and 2,998,671. The mentioned patents are not meant to be reflective of an exhaustive search, but are merely demonstrative of patents in this art. Certainly, other art exists.